


Feeling More Human

by Meduseld



Category: DCU, DCU (Comics), Superman - All Media Types
Genre: And one hell of an internal monologue, Bisexuality, Can't believe I've done that twice, F/M, Identity Porn, Lois has a tough job and a good imagination, Masturbation, masturbation as an excuse for character study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2019-08-12
Packaged: 2020-08-19 14:07:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20211010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meduseld/pseuds/Meduseld
Summary: Lois unwinds.





	Feeling More Human

**Author's Note:**

> For the DC Bingo prompt "Identity Porn". And on a related note: BINGO!

There’s a thin layer of dust on everything in the apartment, full of the sort of cold air that speaks of a long emptiness.

Lois is used to it, coming home to a near abandoned house, practically frozen in time with the half-filled hamper, the clothes now Schrodinger’s clean-or-dirty.

She doesn’t even want to think about the state of the fridge.

Lois will be the first to admit that she’s no Martha Stewart, but even she couldn’t do much if she hadn’t been home for over a month.

And then she remembers the prison stint, rolling her eyes at the way her brain refuses to just shut the fuck _off_ even now when she’s so tired her vision’s gone double. At least she thinks she doesn't have two coffee tables, but it's not impossible either.

It’s not her main concern.

After six weeks deeply embedded in a country that doesn’t technically exist -yet or anymore, depending on your point of view- with only some three hours of sleep per night and a deep film of grime all over her skin that will take more than a few showers to dispel, she needs to _stop_. Stop thinking, stop fighting, stop _being_ just for a second.

There’s a lot of ways to do that, she knows, most deeply unhealthy. Most of her colleagues, the men and women she admires, the ones that helped her become who she is, who she was meant to be, are riddled with the sallow cheeks, yellow teeth, track marked arms and broken veins of one addiction or several. Besides the one to adrenaline that binds them all together.

It’s Lois’ only one, so far. But she can admit that she understands the appeal, a lifeline away from the yawning void, a way to get out of her head and back in her body. Even with the aches. _Because _of the aches.

She’s been ignoring the hunger and the bruising to get the story, to get the truth. That’s done now and she has to live in her skin again.

At least, over the years, she’s found the kindest ways to do it.

Sometimes a bath is enough, long and hot and luxurious, only getting out when the wrinkles of her toes and fingers can’t feel the dirt anymore.

But that’s not going to cut it today. What she needs a little rendezvous with her special drawer, then to pass out on her own sheets on her own bed.

They’re very nice if she does say so herself, equipped with a high thread count and a floral pattern she loves, one of the perks of not actually being home enough to spend most of her monthly salary or go out.

The rest of that extra cash usually goes to the drawer, the one that she doesn’t have to secure in any way. Expensive though they are, they're not a hot ticket item for burglars, who wouldn't find anything else worth taking, and they're the only ones besides her that might open the drawer.

The perks of being single, of which she’s found many, after she realized that she wasn’t so much married to the job as consumed by it. Or maybe infected is a better word, she thinks as she pulls of her boots, a fine trickle of sand pouring onto her floor along with them.

It used to bother her. Now she thinks of the cleanup as meditative, when she gets to it later. And it's always later.

There’s a glorious feeling of decadence to curling her bare toes, milky white after weeks locked away in sturdy boots, and putting them fearlessly on the hardwood floor.

Her hardwood floor, her ridiculously puffy chair that clashes with the rest of the room, her fake orchids, her ashtray that someone gifted her without knowing she hates the smell of tobacco, her house bought and paid for, all _hers_.

She can take off her clothes and leave them in a heap right there, on the sand, because who can stop her? It feels amazing, nothing but air on her skin, no eyes or sand or heavy flak jacket.

It’s not quite Risky Business, but she half dances into her bedroom, moving flawed and free, all her limbs shaking to a beat only she can hear. Lois could play music, blast it all away, but she’s had a loud few weeks, explosions and jets and crying.

She doesn’t want to hear anyone but herself. And the click of her hall closet, where she keeps the towels. They’re as fluffy as she can buy them, an indulgence to match her sheets, and Lois takes the two that are biggest and fluffiest.

One she tosses on the bathroom counter, ready and waiting for her. The other she carefully drapes on the big, overstuffed armchair she keeps in her bedroom, olive green and clashing with the rest of the decor. She loves it.

There’s nothing better than curling up on it with a book or her laptop, a childhood dream fulfilled. And there’s also this, the way it’s a great position with the necessary leverage, and doesn’t dirty up her sheets besides.

Lois considers the drawer before she flops down into the soft curves of the chair. She’s almost spoiled for choice, if there was something she really would choose. But looking down on all her riches, she realizes it’s not what she wants right now.

They’re all a little too far from real touch, and while her nails are far from salon perfect, they’re not too raggedy to stop her.

It’s the perfect welcome home gift: an orgasm, a shower and a night in her own bed.

The only thing that’s missing is a meal. And then she remembers the carefully packed casseroles Clark Kent filled her freezer with, neatly labeled in his block print with instructions for heating and keeping.

He’d had a look of quiet horror when she laughed off the hunger after the assignment in Bialya, and her non-existent cooking skills. Then he’d brought her an armful, enough for months. It hadn’t felt like pity. It had felt like care. Because he’s a great guy, truth be told. And not bad to look at. 

And that’s an excellent train of thought to follow, his strong arms and broad back, as she drops her hand between her legs.

She’s wet the second she actually touches herself, keyed up from the fact that she _can_.

And from how long it’s been since she’s had anything like a moment to herself. Her fingers slide in, slick and just this side of painful and _oh! _her back is already arching as she relearns herself.

Lois could make this easy, quick and dirty, just the right side of rough and a twist from her fingers and be done with it.

She’s already halfway there, drunk on the feeling. But that wouldn’t be treating herself.

Reluctantly she pulls her hand back, running the other along her neck and chest and middle. Her nails aren't a problem now, the perfect kind of sting to ground her inside a body with buzzing skin. There's a special kind of pleasure to the way they scratch along the back of her head, pulling on her hair with the perfect amount of strength.

Clark Kent had tucked her hair away from her face plenty of times, always with permission, and usually after a barked order from Lois because it was getting in her eyes as she dug through a dumpster or something even worse smelling.

It was always a stutter-shock of surprise when his fingertips grazed her, always careful, and she felt how soft they were. No calluses, despite his size and his years of farm work. Lois' own hands are far rougher as they travel down her navel to her thighs.

She'd looked into him when they first met, convinced the homegrown country schtick was just an act betrayed by hands that felt like they’d never done a day of work against Lois’s own calluses when they shook.

But he’s legit, the real McCoy, the last of the All-American Boys. It's hot as hell, his aw shucks ma’am thing, when it’s not annoying, because he means it. The fact that he looks the way he looks helps.

And Lois, being Lois, took that information and spun it into two very different, very effective, fantasies.

The first is one of her favorites, the one where she dirties him up a little. A real bodice ripper where she corners him in the copy room and shoves him onto it to tarnish his virtue, Clark Kent blushing all _Oh Ms. Lane! _

It’s not the one she’s thinking of when she finally moves her hand over herself, where she’s wet and slick and wanting, her middle finger teasing at her clit.

She’s thinking of the one she doesn’t use as often because he’s moved into that weird space where she both knows him too well and not well enough to not feel a little guilty tinge.

He’s not the hot girl on her way back from a workout that she glimpsed on the subway or an ex-lover with a body that’s been on hers. She has no idea how built he might really be, under those ill-fitting and cheap Walmart shirts, but the Clark in her head and in the chair with her right now is nicely solid, yet soft enough to still be inviting. The girls in the web sections would probably call it a dad bod.

It works best, because thinking of him with washboard abs just makes her laugh. He’s not the type.

She's not laughing now though, pretending the careful movement of her finger sliding in, just the one, belongs to him instead. It’s so easy to picture him in her mind’s eye, biting his lip and sneaking glances at her, those grey-blue owl eyes serious behind the thick lenses of his glasses.

Clark would treat her carefully, respectfully, like she was precious. And in the fantasy, Lois actually lets him. Can let him.

He’d be gentle about it, surprisingly graceful with those big hands, she’s found. And he cares. He must be big all over, so she adds another finger, starting to breathe hard.

If he was here, if he was in her, he’d probably choke back the sound because good boys don’t let on.

He’d breathe in her ear and she was beautiful and special and Lois can’t keep that up because it makes her sad, makes her remember she’s her alone, fish belly pale after days in the desert on a chair she bought for fucking herself and reading books on.

She shifts her fingers and the image in her head, imagining those glasses perched somewhere between the edge of his nose and the swell of her mound as he licks at her with the same steady determination he shows for everything.

It’s easy to picture her hands sliding into his hair, thick and black as they can make it, directing him the way she likes: harder, deeper, faster.

That’s when her fingers still, frustrated and her back hits the chair again. It’s what she would do, if it was real. It’s not what she wants right now, what she needs, to not be the one making the decisions for half a second.

Clark would let her lead, and there’s a part of her that kind of loves him for it, but that’s a heavy word to bring into a jerk-off fantasy especially when it makes her feel cold and in her skin even with a few fingers inside herself.

Another night and she’d think about it. Maybe.

For now, for tonight, she shifts her hand, drags her thumb in a way that makes her keen and slides the other into her hair. Just for a little tug.

The image in her head now doesn’t come with any guilt attached. Half the citizens of Metropolis, male, female or none of the above, use the same one for this.

Blame Superman for having a suit that tight. And a heart that noble, too.

It’s easy, here and now, to bring up the sense memory of Superman lifting her into the sky, safe in arms like warm steel beams. The way he’d tell her to hold onto the spot where his cape fastened to his shoulder, not calling it a clasp, said in a low comforting way, like he’d worked out the best way to phrase it for terrified bystanders to follow.

She hasn’t talked her face into his neck even though she wanted to, that first time and every time since. But it was all too easy to remember the warmth coming from his skin like a wave.

All of him was easy to picture, like a knight in a story. In the full light of the sun, or fires of various origins, or Lex Luthor’s (alleged, for legal reasons) robot’s death rays, his hair was so black it looked blue. And his eyes. Those impossibly electric blue eyes that could see into forever.

Just like that she was soaked again, so wet it was dripping from her fingers.

His competence was sexy. His voice was sexy. And the complete lack of knowledge about him beyond that was sexiest of all.

She could be honest with herself, three fingers deep and moaning. Superman could be as experience and stalwart and true as she liked. She doesn’t know him so he’s anybody she wants him to be.

She’s back in rhythm now, the same rolling movement in her fingers, wrist and hips.

Thinking of him advancing on her on some glamorous anonymous penthouse roof because you might as well go all out in a fantasy and she can’t picture him in her apartment anyway. _Oh Ms. Lane_ he’d say, confident and smirking, hands like bulwarks on her hips, her thighs, spreading them apart.

Even if she knew how the costume worked she would still be picturing it the way she is now: solid and sleek except for a zip or a slit for him to slip through. No other skin.

It’s easy to picture his weight on her, the hard thrust of him, but not his face. She’s seen it, and not just in blurry candids by Olsen, maybe a hundred times by now, but can’t bring it together correctly in her mind and it makes her frown, biting her lips.

It’s not enough, like this and suddenly her climax seems so far away that part of her wants to cry. _Fine_, she thinks, wild and baring her teeth, _fine_.

She pulls up a kaleidoscope of old standbys: Ty from that one summer and his freckled chest; Cat Grant that one unspeakable night with her drunken tongue in Lois’ mouth; Wonder Woman’s arms; Clark’s really buff friend with all those tattoos; Superman’s ass flexing in that suit; Clark himself lifting boxes like it’s nothing and _oh!_

The image comes together so sharply, so instantly, that it hits the core of her, so unbearably hot that her hips arch right off the chair, thrusting helplessly into her own touch.

Superman at her back, his perfect Vitruvian man body taking her weight even better than her favorite chair. Iron hands holding her still in his lap no matter how desperate her movements. Clark Kent kneeling between their spread legs to lick at the place where they were joined, slick and steaming.

She can feel herself throbbing, hot and wet around her fingers, her own panting spurring her own as she can see them clearer and clearer as her hand goes faster and faster.

In her head the two of them are working at her, Superman’s smirk at her neck and Clark’s grin between her thighs. Their hands, overlapping on her hips, so different but skin on skin on skin.

The two halves of them making a whole around her. The perfect man, if he was real.

She can have this, though, in the stroke of her own hand, her clever fingers.

Lois can picture them moving on her, inside her. It’s an impossible thought, Clark standing up and pulling himself straight. Matching his own hardness against Superman’s, lining up, pushing into her too, tight and right beside him. Making her impossibly full.

It’s dirty. It’s perfect. It makes her come.

Her orgasm bursts out of her along with a sob deep in her throat. All her strength leaves her but that’s okay. There’s no one there to see.

Lois stretches out her legs, giggling at the feeling of curling her toes on the carpet. In a minute, she’ll get up and stumble into the shower, turning the silver knobs and luxuriating in the spray. Then she’ll curl up in bed and sleep for twelve hours, no dreams to bother her.

In a minute.

**Author's Note:**

> With a title from Hozier's [_Angel of Small Death and the Codeine Scene_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txEI3PEOsPE) because it's plenty sexual even if it isn't directly about self-love; please feel free to picture Clark as an [Igor Gotesman](http://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm-256594/photos/detail/?cmediafile=21552333) type, an objectively huge dude that's so soft spoken and nice you really don't connect him with Superman even if you could; and Lois internally references [that one _Hark! A Vagrant_ strip](http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=120) because she's a woman after my own heart.


End file.
